My Hard-Core Obsession

Threesomes, fishnets, dirty talk—those are the vanilla sorts of fantasies we admit to. Then there's the truly filthy porn we actually watch when we're alone. Shalom Auslander discovers that everyone has his guiltiest pleasure

I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in New York, where the Old Testament was believed to be the literal word of the Almighty God and where we obeyed, as closely as we could, all 613 commandments elucidated within its holy pages. To us, God was not simply a concept, but a very real, everyday presence in our lives and our community. Which is to say, I know pornography. Hard-core, graphic pornography. My father had it buried beneath his mattress. My brother had it hidden under his dresser. Pornography, like God Himself, was everywhere. Sex was dirty. Pornography was worse.

The really bad news was this: God, my rabbis told me, could only grant me forgiveness for the sins I had committed against Him; sins I had committed against my fellow humans could only be forgiven by them personally. If they didn't forgive me, my rabbis said, when I died and went to heaven, God would cause me to suffer in the exact way I had caused them to suffer.

At the time, though only 14 years of age, I had already tired of the porn magazines I found in my house and decided it was time for full-motion video. I went to Times Square, where a group of women stood outside a porn shop, protesting and carrying placards. On one placard was a picture of a naked woman tied to a bed. She had a ball gag in her mouth and clamps on her nipples. I ducked into the store, spent every dollar I'd stolen from my father's wallet, hurried home, and hoped the videos wouldn't work.

They worked.

Fuck.

I wondered what was wrong with me. I wondered how many gang bangs I would have to suffer in heaven. Was it like an eye for an eye—a gang bang for a gang bang—or was it some sort of eternal gang bang that never ended? Would I be anally violated? Would I be spanked? Did they have ropes and ball gags and Ron Jeremy in heaven?

I decided to watch them again. If I did, and they didn't work for me, surely I would be forgiven.

I watched them again.

Fuck.

It has been a guilt-filled few decades.

A while back, I read that a pornographer named Max Hardcore, having been convicted of obscenity charges two years earlier, was serving time in a federal prison in Texas. A few Googles later, I learned that over the course of his career, Max had made hundreds of films, ranging from the mildly rough in his early years to the truly disturbing before his conviction. A few more Googles later and I was watching one of his scenes.

Ext.—Somewhere in California—Day. Open on wooden deck. A bright yellow couch. Max and his co-star appear. Max wears his trademark cowboy hat, white tube socks, and nothing else. The woman wears a ponytail and pink high heels. She lies supine on the couch, legs spread, her head tilted back over the armrest, mouth open. This video seemed to be about a 5 on the Max Hardcore 1-to-10 Scale of Fucked-Upitude. Still, it was shocking. It was outrageous.

I didn't want it to work.

It worked.

Fuck.

It wasn't any one thing they did, not one specific act or position, and I suppose with fantasy it never is; it's a triggering thought, a concept that runs through the mind at just that apical moment, and for me that triggering thought was this: I can't believe she's letting him do that.

I hoped the woman was okay. I hoped she was acting. I hoped she hadn't been forced. I wondered if the founders of Google knew they were contributing to an exploitative, misogynistic industry that lets strange men watch this woman do these strange things. I wondered if I could find her and apologize.

And I wondered, most of all, what the hell was wrong with me.

···

I told my friend Jerry* about Max Hardcore. When Jerry isn't practicing mixed martial arts, he works for the N.Y.C. fire department. I wanted my confession to be met with macho derision, which would shame me out of my shame.

Jerry, it turned out, has a Max Hardcore as well: sleeping-girl porn. In sleeping-girl porn, the woman pretends to be asleep while the man creeps into her room, undresses her, and does his thing.

"Is it like a rape thing?" Jerry wondered aloud about himself. "Do I want to rape someone? Or do I just think she'd never let me fuck her if she was awake, like I'm not good enough for her, like a low-self-esteem thing?"

I didn't know. A subgenre of sleeping-girl porn is drunk-girl porn, in which a girl drinks a tremendous amount of alcohol until she passes out. Then a man undresses her and does his thing. I asked Jerry if the drunk-girl thing worked for him, too.

"No, no, no," said Jerry with a disgusted shake of his head. "That shit," he insisted, "is fucked up."

I told Jerry that I want to locate the woman in the Max Hardcore scene, to ask forgiveness.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm sure that will cheer her right up."

The thing is, I don't like myself very much. I'm my least favorite person in the world, by a long shot, and if you knew all the dark, sick, demented things that go through my mind, you'd agree. I've wasted fifteen years in therapy with a shrink who spends an hour a week trying to persuade me to like myself even the tiniest bit more or to just loathe myself the tiniest bit less. We've made very limited progress.

And so while Jerry felt shame, I was sure his wasn't nearly as warranted as mine. Sleeping girls? Sleeping-girl porn was almost peaceful; she's having a nap. She's catching a few z's. Heck—she's Sleeping Beauty! Max is the Big Bad Wolf, though, and his Little Red Riding Hoods suffer through an ordeal. Which is why, later that evening, I decided to visit Paul Little, a.k.a. Max Hardcore, at the Federal Correctional Institution-La Tuna, just outside El Paso.

I needed to know we were different. I needed to know I wasn't him. I needed to know that whatever the hell was wrong with me was not as bad as whatever the hell was wrong with him.

A couple of thousand miles, I decided, wasn't too far to go to find someone I hated more than myself.

···

The TSA officer at JFK airport waves me forward through the metal detector. I am holding my breath, trying not to make any sudden moves, afraid she will stop me, inspect my bag, and find the image I had printed out from a scene of Max's. The image is of Layla Rivera, a recent Max Girl. A Max Girl is Max's Squeaky Fromme, his favorite, his something-like-a-girlfriend, the girl who gets to live in his California mansion and star in his films. In this shot, Layla's makeup is smeared across her face, her legs are spread, and Max's hand is inside her pussy.